Thinking your way through traffic in a brain-control car

BrainDriver uses an electroencephalography headset developed by
Emotiv. Sixteen sensors measure the brain's electromagnetic signals
and send them to a computer. The computer translates them into
directions -- turn left, turn right, accelerate, stop -- for the
car's drive-by-wire autonomous system to control the brakes,
accelerator and steering.

"Of course this is somewhat slow for real driving, since the
interpretation-integration of commands takes some time, and
therefore you need a big open space to test," Rojas says.

The technology also doesn't work with everyone.

"There is something people in the brain-computer interface
community call 'BCI literacy,' that is, that you can really use a
BCI and control a computer," Rojas says. "For unknown reasons a big
chunk of the population is BCI-illiterate."

That required testing a handful of students. Only the most
"literate" one was turned loose in the Passat.

"He is so good that our psychologists at the university are
starting now to measure him with much more sensors and even to scan
him in an fMRI machine," Rojas says. "They want to find out why
some people are BCI-illiterate and others aren't."

The team tested the tech two weeks ago at Tempelhof airport to
avoid hitting anything, and on campus -- albeit with more rigorous
control by the human driver. Although the technology works, Rojas
says it probably has little application in automobiles.

"Since our main goal is that the car drives itself, and we just
give commands now and then, probably speech recognition is a better
choice," he says. "But BCI is fascinating, and I cannot really
foresee now where all this is going."

Rojas and his team plan to demonstrate their autonomous car with
a real-world test in Berlin traffic later this year.

"We are about to receive the permission from the city, and we
already insured the car for 25 million euros" [£21 million], he
says. "We don't think we will need the insurance but the city is
not taking any chances!"

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